Kali Tal

November 30, 2006

Who Is A Nazi? Name Calling and Hair Pulling

In a moment of lovely synchronicity a friend mentioned that she found my name and photograph on a "hit list" of "self-hating" and "anti-Israel" Jews. I'm not special -- there are about 8,000 people listed -- but I'm among the minority of folks who have photos and blurbs posted about them. Part of what's awful about me (in addition to the fact I signed a petition supporting Palestinian rights and a fair peace settlement) is that I'm "bi-sexual, bi-racial and tattooed." You can see my mug shot if you like; I think it's a cute picture and I find myself in pretty good company with other Jewish progressives and folks who don't think that the genocidal campaign against Palestinians is a good thing.

The blurb of course doesn't mention I'm a Holocaust scholar who worked at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum for years. That would sort of undermine their claim that I'm the equivalent of a member of the "Judenrat" -- the Nazi bureaucracy administered by Jews themselves and set up to manage the ghettos and deportations; in other words, a Jewish Uncle Tom.

But it's interesting (if more than a little nauseating) to be called a Nazi collaborator by one group, while at the same time being charged with calling the members of another group Nazis by implication. Certainly it tells us a lot more about the power and traumatic significance of the term "Nazi" than it tells us about my politics or beliefs, since any term that's used so broadly and in such conflicting ways by groups with such different agendas loses any concreteness of meaning it might once have had.

What "Nazi" has really come to mean in U.S. discourse is "unspeakable." It's the ultimate conversation stopper, after which no comment is really possible. Chomsky talked about this a long time ago, when he was describing the radically pro-Israeli response to his critiques of the treatment of Palestinians. Once somebody publicly calls you a Nazi, what do you say? You're damned if you say you're not, because you're put on the defensive and allow yourself to be sidetracked from your original argument. And you're damned if you say, "Go ahead and call me a Nazi" because nobody thinks being a Nazi is okay and rhetorically such a stance is repulsive. And you're damned if you don't say anything, because once somebody has called you a Nazi the burden of proof is apparently on you to clear yourself.

All of this makes it very difficult to talk about Nazism itself -- a real historical phenomenon with a real history, documented by real evidence -- and to make legitimate comparisons between, say, Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Nazi policy towards Jews and other "undesirables." We've lost an important tool for understanding power structures and oppressive regimes if the word "Nazi" is off limits in analyses and comparisons. And who does this benefit? Certainly not people who are oppressed and suffering.

When I look at who is coopting and appropriating the term "Nazi," it's not generally folks who fall into the camp I consider the "good guys." I don't hear people on the left, feminists, those struggling for black liberation, queer activists or others on "our" side of the fence using the term as a pejorative label to describe general behaviors. No, it's conservatives, war-mongers, racists, sexists, and haters of all varieties who are out there both calling people Nazis and claiming to be called Nazis, right and left, to an extent that has left the word practically meaningless.

Posted by kalital at 4:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2006

Update on Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

Larry Sanger quickly responded to my critique of Citizendium in a very predictable fashion. He called my critique a "threat" and my analysis of his racist and sexist POLICY a "personal insult ... not unlike accusing someone of being a Nazi or fascist." My words are "shocking" and a "conversation stopper" that should be responded to only with "contempt." I'm a "bigot" and "prejudiced" because I use "white man" as a categorical description of... white men.

Challenging a man on racism or sexism apparently gives him license to go on a name-calling spree that so far exceeds the charges about his behavior that it spills over into absurdity. It's another way of making our critiques inaudible or unlistenable. If challenging a person on racist and sexist behavior is instantly inflated into "She called me a Nazi!" then there's really no conversation possible, is there? And who stopped it? Me, by describing policy as racist or sexist, or Sanger, for claiming that the mere mention of racism or sexism is so outrageous that it deserves nothing but contempt? Racism and sexism are the rules in U.S. contemporary culture -- empirically demonstrable phenomena -- but we can't label anyone's behavior racist or sexist because it's too insulting? Nice trick.

And then there is the victim component: Sanger claims that being accused of racism or sexism can cause "social and academic death." I only wish that were true. Unfortunately, racists and sexists carry on every day -- whether they're accused or not -- without interruption, and with a great deal of social approval. As is exemplified by Sanger's own post, where he carries on with great self-righteousness and proficiency, untouched as head of CZ.

The bottom line is that Sanger's categorization policy creates a chilling environment for women and minority participation in CZ, whatever he intends or believes. It does not, despite his protests, create the impression that CZ encourages participation from scholars in those groups. That's just a fact. A nice, neutral fact. And it will be borne out in the demographics of CZ.

Posted by kalital at 8:44 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted.

I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked, in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there were significant participation from black or women scholars from its inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship.

I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him.

Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies:

"I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently
cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying
what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to
make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely
American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and
that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated
groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium Editors listserv]

The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral" is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary, power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub-categories under the control of larger white and male dominated groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are "political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism and racism -- women and minorities.

Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white man in charge.

Sanger claims that his version of neutrality is rooted in Enlightenment principles. But as anyone working race and gender studies knows very well, white men have traditionally only applied Enlightenment principles to each other. It is the work of women and minorities that has extended those principles and challenged those who espouse them to apply them more and more broadly... and it is women and minorities who have risked their livelihoods and even their lives as they have engaged in over 250 years of activist work dedicated to building communities and nations that are free not only in principle, but in fact. By refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories, Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and equality, as conservatives everywhere have been trying to roll back all of our gains.

Frankly, I am embarrassed to have had anything to do with CZ and I will be publicly critiquing Sanger's policy in various venues. I hope that all supporters of race and gender studies will join with me in boycotting CZ, and with protesting Sanger's decision.

You can find more information on Citizendium at http://www.citizendium.org. Most of my discussions with Sanger took place on the Editors listserv, but there are a few on the Citizendium Forum pages:

http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,259.msg2165.html#msg2165
http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,251.msg2164.html#msg2164

Kali Tal
http://www.kalital.com

Posted by kalital at 7:58 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack